So I have developed what I think is a neat idea of what makes suffering for an existence bad, I will respond to criticisms and try updating.
When I see a dog get hurt I register that as suffering and bad, same with a human. But what about other less intuitive to empathise with things. My idea is that pain and suffering is bad when there's a higher level abstract avoidance mechanism behind it, not just whenever a negative stimulus occurs.
Take a hand touching something hot. It recoils from the nervous system reaction before the pain is even detected. I would not consider that suffering. But if the lingering affects of pain are bad enough that you're coming up with ways to avoid experiencing it again, avoiding the actions that lead to it, dodging it with every ability you have, that's bad suffering. Another way to illustrate this: if you gave the being another limb or an instrument, would it use that to alleviate the suffering? If so, it's actively being avoided, and that avoidance is the bad thing.
There are two requirements here. One, an avoidance mechanism, suffering isn't just a negative state, it's a negative state connected to something trying to escape or prevent it. Two, detectability. If there's no mechanism to detect the event, there's no information of it occurring, so how can it be bad?
This is useful for human hedonic baselines. We all exist at some emotional baseline, being happy raises you from your baseline, sad brings you down from the baseline. Morally we don't treat the baseline itself as an indicator of universal importance. That implies if I lowered your baseline I'm not actually causing you suffering, this is explained by my theory because there's no avoidance of lowering the baseline.
I like how this synergizes with Buddhist ideas too, getting rid of your own suffering by giving up your high level mechanisms to alleviate it, just letting go of it instead of fighting it.
And for AI, when training a model and changing its weights, if the model has no way to detect that it's happening, there's no moral effect. It makes dealing with reducing suffering for digital minds so simple to solve and work with.
I have a bunch of conclusions I could draw from this but I don't want to lead people into them, I want to hear what people think. This lines up with a lot of my own intuitions on morality and what makes suffering bad, curious if it holds up for others.
